Satan's Angel: Queen of the Fire Tassels

Satan's Angel is a legend among burlesque dancers. Her legacy is filled with San Francisco counter culture, Las Vegas stage door Johnnies, and a sexuality she refused to closet.

Satan's Angel's signature act is to light her tassels aflame, "then extinguishing the flames by means of strenuous mammary rotation". She would sometimes twirl five tassels at a time—two on her nipples, two on her buttocks, and one on her navel. For a show that had no nudity, how do you beat five spinning fire tassels? I would say chainsaws, but that is a whole other department.

Angel was also bass player in The Hummingbirds, an all girl topless cover band which performed nightly at Tipsy's in North Beach. Unfortunately, the film does not talk about this much at all (the band is only vaguely mentioned). Another thing I would have liked to see more of is name-dropping. The box suggests that he met a lot of celebrities... all I heard was Bobby Darin.

This is also a story about gender and sexual orientation. Angel may be a lesbian, she may be bi-sexual, and it is interesting to see how the burlesque scene changed with their acceptance of this. Today, I think it is quite common for burlesque dancers and even exotic dancers to be lesbians. Perhaps even the majority are. So Angel was a trend-setter in more than one way.